00 DUNLEAVY ET AL PRELIMS A2A0077

The

IMPACTof

the Social ScienceS

How academics and tHeir researcH make a difference

Simon BaStow ? Patrick Dunleavy ? Jane tinkler

with involvement from Rapha?lle Bisiaux, Leandro Carrera, Sofia Goldchluk, Avery Hancock, Ellen Harries, Rebecca Mann,

Anne White, Sierra Williams and Joan Wilson

Preface

There is an interesting asymmetry between the huge volume of literature on the mission and core practices of the individual social science disciplines and the very restricted amount of serious discussion of the social sciences taken as a whole. For each subject like economics, sociology, social psychology or political science, there are swathes of inward-looking books, papers, commentaries and reflections, setting out radically different views and disputing fiercely over future directions, subject priorities, methods issues and rival conceptions of the discipline. When we first began this research in 2009 we naively expected that what was true of the component disciplines must also be true of the discipline group. Yet our searches for any equivalent massing of views and approaches at this broader level yielded only a smattering of gold-dust (extensively referenced in the pages to follow), after which our searches quickly petered out in subject-specific discussions of little wider relevance or in siltedup backwaters of the history of academia or methods development.

So in the end we have written a far larger and more ambitious book than we originally anticipated. In some small part this has been to compensate for the missing contemporary literature on the broader role and mission of the discipline group and its place in the development of contemporary human societies. But far more extensively it reflects the extraordinary value of the `impact' lens as a way of capturing and addressing some common problems and current changes across the social sciences as a whole. When we ask why social science research and insights have been scantily adopted in business, and have been less influential than one might expect in government and civil society; and why the public prestige and government funding of the social sciences lags so far behind that of the `physical' sciences ? these questions automatically point to and prompt a social science solidarity. They draw on a commonality of experience, and awaken awareness of some foundational affinities that the daily academic practice of each discipline tends to fragment and sublimate. There is a fundamental similarity in how social science disciplines are placed within the fabric of our modern, globalizing civilization, one that is thrown into sharp focus by questions about improving impact.

Every social science focuses on constantly shifting human behaviours; conscious that human beings have an innate and un-erodible capacity to change what we do in response to being told why we act as we do, or how we are expected to act in future. No social science produces immutable laws that once established last unchanged. And despite the apparatus of proofs and lemmas found in some mathematicized sub-disciplines, no social science propositions can be proven logically ? without depending on a usually extensive and always contestable repertoire of assumptions

PREFACE

and `primitives' (such as the concept of what a `rational actor' will or must do). All social science generalizations are inherently probabilistic, none are determinate, and all depend on large and baggy ceteris paribus clauses. Every social science must handle an inescapable tension between knowledge advanced by the reductionist research tactic of focusing down on simple processes while `controlling' for more and more factors; and the recognition that all social processes operate in complex, multicausal environments, where hundreds or thousands of influences flux and interact with each other to shape any given social or behavioural outcome, and where the same outcome can eventuate through multiple diverse causal pathways.

As a result of these features, every social science has a research process that is cumulative, largely missing the `breakthrough' discoveries or `lone genius' insights on which public images of the physical sciences and technological disciplines still focus. Only a tiny percentage of social science research results in patents (for which embedding in physical products remains essential), and the vast bulk of university social scientific achievements are solely new (or partly new) ideas. They cannot be copyrighted, protected by intellectual property rights nor used to build scaleable products or comparative advantage for firms in the way that physical technologies often may. And despite many social scientists lusting after the outward trappings of `normal science' practices, all social science disciplines still operate in ways that are a long way off what Randal Collins (1994) calls the `high consensus, rapid advance' model that has served the physical sciences so well since the mid-nineteenth century. Asking about the ways in which social science subjects resonate (or not) with business, government, civil society or the media, unfailingly throws these inherently shared features across the discipline group into a tightly focused spotlight.

Impact as a focus also addresses some critically important aspects of contemporary change in the social sciences. For any societal research to be successfully applied in public or organizational decisions it must be timely, produced speedily, capturing the salient features of a situation and behaviours that may shift quickly in response to new factors, or interaction with previously separate phenomena. All applied and impactful academic knowledge must also be `translated' from single-discipline silos; `bridged' and integrated with the insights of other disciplines in the social sciences or beyond in the applied and human-focused physical sciences; and assimilated into a joined-up picture so as to adequately encompass real world situations. Research advances and insights must also be communicated or transferred to non-academic people and organizations, and their lessons mediated, deliberated and drawn out in useable ways.

In the modern world the transformations of information systems and now scholarship itself via digital changes condense and accelerate many of these necessities, creating a vastly extended set of interfaces between academia and business, government and civil society; allowing the direct and open access publication and broadcasting of academic research and ideas without the intermediation of conventional publishing or media systems; and greatly speeding up the potential tempo of knowledge production and transfer. Again the impacts agenda speaks directly to these potentially common, civilization-wide changes that now occupy a central place in the evolution of modern academia.

For these reasons we make no apology for the resolutely `broad-front' focus of this book on the social sciences as a whole, and our complete refusal to discuss in

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THE IMPACT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

particular detail any component subject within the discipline group. We recognize that thinking at this scale is not familiar or easy for most social scientists. But we urge readers to make the intellectual leap involved, to scale up their frame of reference, and to look wider than has become customary in universities in our specialized age. The social sciences have a critical role to play in the development of human civilization, but it will not be achieved in fragments or by focusing down on bit-part roles or narrowly technical scraps of argumentation. The post-war wave of research specialization has yielded enormous benefits and advances, so that all the social sciences of today are almost unrecognizably further developed than they were in the 1930s. Yet the dialectic of intellectual development has now swung emphatically towards an open social science ? one that is far more inter-disciplinary, far more integrated with many applied physical sciences, and far more democratically accessible to and directly interacting with citizens and organizations in civil society.

Of course, a necessary defect of working on a big canvass is that key details may be brushed over, and no small group of authors can have mastery of the whole field. So we warmly encourage readers to update us, and to contest, critique, extend or comment on the book's analysis in any form that seems best.

Simon Bastow s.j.bastow@lse.ac.uk @simonjbastow

Patrick Dunleavy p.dunleavy@lse.ac.uk @PJDunleavy

LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog

Jane Tinkler j.tinkler@lse.ac.uk @janetinkler

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1

The social sciences in modern research

Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. W.H. Auden1

[N]o public policy can be developed, no market interaction can occur, and no statement in the public sphere can be made, that does not refer explicitly or implicitly to the findings and concepts of the social and human sciences.

Bj?rn Wittrock2

We live now in a world without frontiers to the unknown, one intensively-investigated planet with a pooling civilization, converging cultures, a single mode of production, and a fragile but enduring peace between states (if one still marred by inherently temporary imperial adventures, civil wars, ethnic divisions, dictatorial excesses, and governance collapses). Human societies also operate within a single global ecosystem, from whose patterns of development there is (and can be) no escape. Perhaps the single best hope for the survival and flourishing of humanity lies in the development of our knowledge ? about `natural' systems; and about the complex systems that we have ourselves built and the ways in which we behave within them. The scope of systems on Earth that are `human-dominated' or `human-influenced' has continuously expanded, and the scope of systems that are `purely' natural has shrunk ? to such an extent that even the climate patterns and average temperatures across the planet are now responding (fast) to human interventions in burning fossil fuels.

This is the essential context within which the social sciences have moved to an increasingly central place in our understanding of how our societies develop and interact with each other. The external impact of university research about humandominated and human-influenced systems ? on business, government, civil society, media and culture ? has grown enormously in the post-war period. It is entering a

1 Quote from the poem Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (Auden, 1946). 2 Wittrock (2010: 207).

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